Early retirement is about an attitude change. It is also about taking charge of your life rather than letting it slip away. It is not uncommon to wake up one day and to realise that 10, 20 or even 30 years of your life have passed and we have not achieved what we really want to do. I refused to play that game which is why I want to retire early. I want to take back the control of my life that I have freely given away to companies that do not deserve them.

Each one of use has around 28,800 days to live assuming we reached the age of 80. That is it. only 28,800 days to live! When I first saw this number, it woke me up! When you measured things in years or months, they seem to be less urgent. However, when I saw my life expressed in days, I realise that it is not a big number. The worst part of it is I have already spent 12,240 days, leaving me with only 16560 days to live. Taking away say 1,800 days where I am too old to do anything, I am left with only 14,760 days.

14,760 days to live!

Only less than 15,000 days to live and most of it will go towards a job that most don’t really love? No. That is not what I want at all. This is my wake up call. I need to take control of this precious resource that I have left only so much of.

In a nutshell, this is what early retirement is about. It is to do with taking back what you have given away freely. When I signed up for a job, I am trading away my life for a few lousy bucks. My time is suddenly not mine. It belongs to somebody else. However, time is the most precious thing that anyone can have. You can always earn more money but you can’t earn back time. Everybody knows it but the point is not always driven deep enough to realise the implications.

I am not a qualified financial planner nor am I some retirement guru. I just have a plan and I stick to it. Sometimes this is all you need. A determination to break away from what you know is not right and to formulate another path to where you want to go. Your early retirement plan can be a savings plan or it can be a income generating plan like mine. It doesn’t matter. You just need a plan to take control of your life As they say, failure to plan is to plan for failure and we all don’t want our lives to be a big failure right?

Remember, you have only 28,800 days to live. Make the most of it!